Monthly Archives: July 2022

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And may their illusions rest in peace.

Martha Ketro

Many of us feel that life is accelerating, and we are not keeping up. We respond to e-mails late, do not have time to respond to posts on social networks, read little, and rarely communicate with relatives and children. In general, we are constantly lagging. We feel like we need to be more organized and plan our day better. We are told that to be successful you need to train your brain and learn to manage your time.

As a doctor, I will tell you the truth in fact, all this is useless

The problem is not in us and our disorganization. The problem is the growth of the information flow and the physiological limit of the speed of information processing.

Information singularity what is it and why is it dangerous

Processing speed is the time it takes for our brain to complete a mental task. The rate at which a person identifies information both visually (through letters and numbers) and auditory (through words and familiar sounds). Technically, this is the time between receiving a stimulus and starting to respond to it.

I will not now go into the details of psychometric testing and methods for experimentally determining the speed of information processing that the human nervous system is capable of. There are several groups of tests based on the classic Konner test and the Wechsler memory scale, as well as special tasks that determine the speed of information processing.

With a high degree of certainty, all the above tests show that the human speed of information perception cannot exceed 50 bits per second. At the same time, such indicators are achievable mainly for some women, in whom the hemispheres of the brain are slightly better connected than in most men. For many men, the maximum perceptual rate will be closer to 40 bps.

Facts you almost certainly didnt think about

In 2020, there were 4.5 billion active users of the World Wide Web in the world. On the evening of March 10, 2020, one of the busiest network nodes in the world (Frankfurt DE-CIX) recorded the highest level of traffic in history over 9.1 Tbps. This meant that even if all mankind involved on the Internet tried to understand and process such a data stream, then, due to the physiological limit of perception, people would be able to comprehend less than 0.1 percent of the information transmitted by a single network node.

Considering the rate of accumulation of digital information and the fact that more than 90% of the digital data existing in the world was created over the past 10 years, in 20-30 years (between 2040 2050) an endless gap will form between the physiological parameters of perception and the total amount of information accumulated by mankind. A person will completely lose the ability to independently navigate and effectively move in the global information field.

What does this mean for the lives of each of us?

This will mean a state of information singularity in which almost all information will become virtually inaccessible, and what you can get from the worldwide network will in fact reflect the local information field formed around your person.

How to imagine it?

Never has our brain faced this kind of problem, so the information singularity is difficult to comprehend. All we can do is try to model this situation with a hypothetical example.

Lets say you use a paper address book. This handbook now has 100,000 pages and is a huge book that can hardly fit in your room. If you know the alphabet and have enough time, effort, and perseverance, you can still find the address of a specific person (for example, with the name Raymond Kurzweil). In the state of information singularity, your conditional reference book will have more than 1 quadrillion pages (a number with 62 zeros) and its volume will exceed the volume of our planet. Any search in such conditions will become impossible and all that will remain for you is just to open the page that will be next to you (guess for why it will be nearby). What will be there you will read. Instead of searching, you will be able to receive only the information that was created personally for you.

Was this situation foreseen?

It was not for nothing that I mentioned the name of Raymond Kurzweil, a futurist who predicted the onset of a technological singularity in 2045.

In fact, instead of a technological singularity, we will face a much more dangerous phenomenon an information singularity.

Whats the Difference?

A technological singularity is a moment after which technological progress will accelerate and become so complicated that it becomes inaccessible to human understanding. In other words, the technological singularity is a kind of consumer infantilism raised to the absolute.

But lets honestly ask ourselves, how many people right now understand where the cutting edge of science is, what is known to mankind and how technology is developing? In fact, 99% of people (including many scientists) have been in this state for a long time.

The information singularity is something less pleasant and more dangerous. In the state of information singularity, it becomes impossible to search for and receive third-party (not prepared for you in advance) information. We note for ourselves that the information singularity is not progress and development, but simply the absence of a choice.

Evolution our next move or how to survive and win

We must understand that the development of Internet technologies requires from us not only participation and understanding but also a deep physiological transformation.

In order not to lose control over our own lives, we must increase the speed of information processing available to our nervous system. To do this, we will have to connect our brain with a computer system at the level of neurons and neurophysiology. This will remove the bottleneck in the communication channel the decoding of visual or audio characters.

To do this, in addition to the neurocomputer interface, our brain will need a fast, strong, and maximally accessible assistant. Personal artificial intelligence is not just a new technology. In fact, it is an evolutionary attempt to adapt to the growing ocean of digital information. If we want to maintain the status of the dominant intelligent species in the biosphere, we must immediately begin to modernize our nervous system.

Instead of creating machine intelligence as an alternative to human intelligence, we must turn our biological brain into the heart of a new AI: individual artificial intelligence.

We must realize that we are living in an era of dizzying evolutionary transformation that will culminate in a test of survival.

Exam the date of which is set for 2045.

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How to prepare our minds for the information singularity? - TechTalks

Join executives from July 26-28 for Transform's AI & Edge Week. Hear from top leaders discuss topics surrounding AL/ML technology, conversational AI, IVA, NLP, Edge, and more. Reserve your free pass now!

Trying to keep up with the pace of modern threats through manual approaches alone is impossible. AI and Automation are now must-have tools for organizations looking to prevent intrusions.

Because of this, today, autonomous cybersecurity provider SentinelOne and Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) Digital Hands announced a strategic partnership.

As part of this agreement, the two providers will combine the SentinelOnes Singularity XDR Platform with Digital Hands CyGuard Maestro security fabric and security operations center (SOC).CyGuard Maestro will integrate with SentinelOne Singularity to provide additional automated capabilities, such as executing playbooks to isolate endpoints infected with malware and scanning the network for other threats.

The two solutions will also share intelligence, with CyGuard Maestro ingesting data from Digital Hands Harbinger Threat Intelligence feed and comparing it with SentinelOne Singularitys data to provide enterprises with more in-depth contextual threat analysis.

With the cyber skills gap in full swing, most organizations dont have the internal resources they need to protect their resources against advanced threat actors, particularly with the increase in adoption of remote and hybrid working.

Organizations are progressively adopting pure cloud and cloud-focused hybrid information technology models when executing Digital Transformation initiatives and migrating their infrastructure to the cloud to achieve critical business objectives and needs, said chief customer officer at Digital Hands, Charlotte Kibert.

This shift to cloud and SaaS platforms, along with more remoter workers, has increased the traditional enterprises attack surface exponentially leaving more security blind spots and vulnerabilities than ever before, Kibert said.

Kibert notes that this movement toward digitization has made it more difficult to implement robust security monitoring of legacy infrastructure.

Digital Hands and SentinelOnes new partnership aims to address this by providing security teams with the automated capabilities they need to detect and respond to threats across the entire attack surface.

For SentinelOne, the partnership has the potential to enhance its position in the XDR market, which researchers value at $985 million in 2022 and anticipate will reach $2,358 million by 2027.

The organization is competing in the market against some monolithic competitors, including CrowdStrike, which offers its own XDR solution called Falcon XDR.

Falcon XDR ingests data from telemetry throughout the environment, giving the user the option to search structured and unstructured data and automatically identify threats. Crowdstrike recently announced raising Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of $217 million.

SentinelOne is also competing with endpoint protection providers like Microsoft Defender for Endpoint.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint uses sensors to collect and process behavioral signals from the users operating system, translating them into insights and recommending responses to threats.

It also provides threat intelligence that can generate alerts on malicious tools, techniques and procedures discovered. Microsoft recently announced raising $51.7 billion in revenue last year.

SentinelOnes new partnership with Digital Hands and claims it has the potential to differentiate it from existing XDR and endpoint protection solutions with greater automation capabilities.

The combination delivers unrivaled coverage, protection, and efficiency, said Brandon Andrews, vice president of Worldwide MSSP at SentinelOne.

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Digital Hands and SentinelOne join forces to automate the SOC - VentureBeat

In theory, its possible to create jet fuel from nothing more than water, CO2, and energy from the sun, but doing so outside of the laboratory has proved challenging. Now researchers have created the first fully-integrated system capable of doing it at scale in the field.

Aviation accounts for around five percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and its proven stubbornly difficult to decarbonize. While other sectors have relied on electrification to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, the stringent weight constraints of aviation make relying on battery power unfeasible anytime in the near future.

Theres growing consensus that any realistic route to decarbonizing aviation by the middle of this century will require the use of sustainable drop-in fuels, which refers to fuels that work with existing jet engines and fueling infrastructure. The logic is that any alternative power source like batteries, liquid hydrogen, or liquid ammonia will require unrealistic levels of investment in new aircraft and fuel storage and distribution systems.

Researchers are investigating a wide variety of approaches to making sustainable aviation fuels. The most common today involves creating kerosene by reacting animal or vegetable oils with hydrogen. The approach is well established, but there are limited renewable sources of these feedstocks and there is competition from biodiesel from the automotive sector.

An emerging approach involves creating fuel by directly combining green hydrogen with carbon monoxide derived from captured CO2. This is much more challenging because all the steps involvedelectrolyzing water to create green hydrogen, capturing CO2 from the air or industrial sources, reducing CO2 to CO and combining them to create keroseneuse lots of energy.

The advantage is that the raw ingredients are abundant, so finding a way to reduce the energy requirements could open the door to a plentiful new source of sustainable fuels. A new plant that uses an array of mirrors to direct sunlight towards a solar reactor on top of a tower could be a promising approach.

We are the first to demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain from water and CO2 to kerosene in a fully-integrated solar tower system, Aldo Steinfeld from ETH Zurich, who led the research, said in a press release. This solar tower fuel plant was operated with a setup relevant to industrial implementation, setting a technological milestone towards the production of sustainable aviation fuels.

The facility, described in a paper in Joule, features 169 sun-tracking reflective panels that redirect and concentrate sunlight into the solar reactor perched on top of a 49-foot-high tower. Water and CO2 are pumped into the solar reactor, which contains a porous structure made of ceria, an oxide of the rare-earth metal cerium.

The ceria helps drive a redox reaction that strips oxygen from the water and CO2 to create a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen known as syngas. The ceria is not consumed by this process and can be re-used, while the excess oxygen is simply released into the atmosphere. The syngas is pumped down the tower to a gas-to-liquid converter, where it is processed into liquid fuel that contains 16 percent kerosene and 40 percent diesel.

By using the heat of the sun to drive the entire process, the setup provides a way around the considerable electricity demands of more conventional approaches. However, the researchers note that the efficiency of their system is still relatively low. Only four percent of the captured solar energy was converted into chemical energy in the syngas, although they see a route to increasing that to above 15 percent.

The overall production levels are also a long way from what would be required to make a dent in the aviation industrys fuel demands. Despite the facility taking up space equivalent to a small car park, it was only able to produce just over 5,000 liters of syngas in 9 days. Considering only 16 percent of that was then converted into kerosene, the technology will have to scale up considerably.

But this is the largest-scale demonstration of using sunlight to create sustainable fuels to date, and as the researchers point out, the setup is industrially realistic. With further tweaking and a lot of investment, this could one day offer a promising way to make sure our flights are less of a burden on the environment.

Image Credit: ETH Zurich

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This 'Solar Tower' System Produces Jet Fuel From CO2, Water, and Sunlight - Singularity Hub